Life is not living in the suburbs with a white picket fence. That's not life. Somehow our American culture has made it out that that's what life needs to be - and that if it's not that, it's all screwed up. It's not.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Yeah, you got the family dog and the white picket fence, and you just think that's all there is. Some of us had to grow up in poverty-stricken urban neighborhoods, and we just had to adapt to our environment. I know that it's wrong. But people act like it's some crazy thing they never heard of. They don't know.
I'm sorry - I know America is supposed to be the land of the dreams and hopes, but it's like, when was that actually a real thing? I think from the very beginning it was all a lie, and it still kind of is. Stop trying to sell the picket fence, because there's another backyard here that you haven't looked at.
It's all kind of a big illusion: the white picket fence and the perfect marriage and the kids. Check that box off, check that box off, and move forward.
I'm not white-picket-fence perfect.
Life is lived on the edge.
I think there are two prevailing views of the suburbs in the States: either they're this sort of tedious place, where everyone is the same, buys the same food and drives around in their little minivans, or the view is that the suburbs are extremely perverse in a humorous way.
Sometimes when you're relegated to your neighborhood, you forget that there's more important things than your neighborhood going on out in the world.
In Paris, where I live, the inner neighborhoods are only available to the white elite. The poor and dispossessed are shuffled out to suburbs and never seen.
The security fence is reversible. Human lives are irreversible.
The suburbs are the American dream, right? Living in a nice house, having a good job, a happy family.